Saturday, November 6, 2010

Five Wounds: Review at 'Transnational Literature'

Think back to your first trip with Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, or how it feltto enter the Matrix after Neo takes the red pill. Five Wounds: An Illuminated Noveltakes you down a similarly twisting path and leaves you pondering the journey wellafterwards. Pooling influences trans-national, trans-cultural, trans-temporal and transartform, authors Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett spin the story of ‘five woundedorphans [who] must face their traumatic origins’ (blurb). These tales are told throughthe fascinating combination of Walker’s proclamatory prose, Hallett’s Goya andcomic-book influenced illustrations, a Bible-like layout and handwritten notations.Described as ‘cruel and arbitrary’ (blurb) by the authors, the world of FiveWounds looks and feels at once early renaissance, modern and apocalyptic.

I am particularly pleased to see a review in a journal on transnational literature, since many of the sources for Five Wounds are Italian: notably, Italo Calvino and Tintoretto. Below is a selection of transnational sources taken from a detail of an illustration (by Dan Hallett) on p. 100 of the novel.

I am currently working on Brethren, a novel; and other projects, including Reciprocity Failure (a novella illustrated with my own photographs) and Cartesian Blues (a graphic memoir illustrated by Dan Hallett). Many of the photographs to be included in Reciprocity Failure can be found at:

Most of the photographs displayed on this blog are my own. A few, however, are by other, more famous photographers (always credited), and are displayed for discussion purposes only under fair use guidelines. If any copyright holders object to their use here, I would be happy to remove them on request.